Design

Moving on from the Logo design I decided to re-address the characters, looking primarily at the Carrot Character. So I started by sketching out some possible characters. There are a few various styles and some are more pleasing to look at than others. Whereas some are more suitable than others.

From here I moved onto iterating the various parts that would make up the face of the carrot. Breaking down the Eyes, Mouths and Noses, and creating multiple variants until the final design emerged its weary head.

This now gives me enough information to begin the basic final design of the Carrot character, but I still need to give him a personality before moving onto the final render. Watch this space!

So I thought it would be prudent to upload my personal design process, much like many others, I follow a simple 8 step process. But first let me tell you that I have been looking around at some other design processes today and surprise surprise, they all have a very similar trend, I’ve found that the Design Council sums this all up in a handy little guide and description on their site. It breaks down the design process into 3 areas (Discover, Define and Develop) that are easy to remember. The 3 D’s are then broken down into sub categories to help you get to grips with this process of working. Below is their process and a link to the original. I strongly recommend having a full read through the original because they also break down each of the sub categories to help you better understand all these stages.

I will upload have uploaded my design process soon, but rather than just uploading a written list I’m going to create I have created a design and presented it visually, when now It’s done you’ll find it Here.

So today I began to consider the aesthetic and overall look that I am wanting to achieve with Vegetrouble. To get this pinned down I started with some basic research on visual presentation and the first two elements I came across was the rule of thirds and the Fibonacci sequence.

Rule of thirds:

The rule of thirds looks at the composition of a visual, whether that be a photograph, painting, video or other. This is more of a guideline than an actual rule but it is universally known and followed. The premise being that if you where to take your visual and split the image into three horizontal and three vertical sections all of equal size, you would want the focal point of your image to be sat on one of these slices (preferably one horizontal and one vertical, so… at the cross sections). These are natural points in an image that the human eye is drawn to. Here are some examples of this.

Marek Denko’s Souvenir overlayed with the Rules of Thirds GuidesRyan Church’s Godzilla concept art piece from June 2012 overlayed with the Rule of Thirds Guides.

Fibonacci Sequence:

This is one of my faves, this little calculation works by adding the two previous numbers together to get to the next number in the sequence. so… 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89 and so on. This equations when transferred onto paper in a visual form makes a sort of spiral, this spiral and mathematical calculation can be seen everywhere in nature and is known as the golden rule. Below are a few stock images I have used and overlayed the Fibonacci pattern over the top, just to illustrate its existence in nature.

The Fibonacci Spiral Layed over an image of water spraying from a ball under Centrifugal force.The Fibonacci Spiral Layed over an image of a galaxy.The Fibonacci Spiral Layed over an image of a Cactus.

And so.. the time has come to do some expeimentations of my own, looking at both the Rule of Thirds and the Fibonacci Sequence I will begin laying out some guides to aid in the development of the games Ident and some Character designs.